The Ghost Brush (34 page)

My heart warmed. But I chided myself. He was flattering me? Or being flirtatious? “My father has been ill,” I said, “but your beru has cheered him.”

I wondered if I had thanked him enough. My father was improving; maybe the doctor really did work miracles. I walked away. I met two geisha coming in. They were entertainers who would dance and sing and serve them drink. Not courtesans, but a cut above. Still, he would not lack for stimulation.

That was the last time I spoke with him.

H
is much-delayed audience with the Shogun took place. Immediately afterwards, the Tokugawa were finished with the Dutch. They were no longer welcome in Edo. There was a rush to get them out. Von Siebold and his entourage marched out of Edo without the pomp of his entrance, the doctor a full head taller than the rest, with his long, kind face quite absent of expression. I was just a woman at the side of the street in the crowd when I last saw him.

Spring turned to summer. And here I was in the walled-in world. Despite his protestations of love for Japan, von Siebold would go back to his country. I consoled myself that he had my pictures. I pictured his life: he made visits to his wife and child every day; he had his school near the waterfall and the many Japanese doctors who learned the operations that had made him famous. He loved us, but he would be gone. “Our” pictures would go with him.

And now I had a little, high-up window in the walls.

26

Dark Years

LIFE, LIKE ART, IS FULL OF INCIDENT
. Some people’s more than others’.

My father’s life, like his art, was broad, scattered with figures, events, characters, exertion everywhere—up planks and up mountains, across rivers, on platforms—twinkling and never dull. There was no emphasis. Everything was in competition; anything could distract the eye. A little man at the edge of the paper carrying a bucket will be given his humorous face and his odd posture to amuse. And in the centre a woman bid her lover farewell. These were equal in importance. The whole place is buzzing. At any time, in any place, someone was putting out for the audience, and none of this merited his indifference.

But my life was not.

Not that way.

My life was like a painting on silk, intense but softened. It was a dark splatter of blood on an empty canvas. Examined carefully, it was not just a splash but a cluster—figures pushed together, too close, against each other. These figures are distinct, they are technical, they are dark and deeply impressed. But they float in space, mere space, empty space that makes them severe. Beyond my immediate world was emptiness. Great events and signs were absent for years on end. Then they all came at once.

M
Y FATHER WAS NOT MUCH BETTER
, although every day he rose to say that he was cured. The censors continued their attacks, and times were dark. Often, as I worked on small commissions, I returned in my mind to my conversations with the Miracle Doctor, and to the scenes he had conjured: kings and queens of Europe swirling in each other’s arms in a place called “ballroom.” A man in a great forest drawing the birds as they nested. Wild people wearing feather headdresses and building conical houses of animal skin at the foot of giant mountains, each peak as high as Fuji-san. The idea of the world beyond our gated and moated city gave me comfort, I suppose. I hoped too that one day I would come across Shino on the street, her shaven eyebrows and simple hairstyle leaving her face all the more visible. I even wondered if I had passed her, one year or another, and not known her.

We were sad, which was why my father and I maintained our little games. Hokusai massaged his tongue. He stuck it in and out, and I laughed at him. He put it to work again telling ghost stories. There was one about sailors who drowned in a typhoon. It took more patience than I possessed to listen to him, but I begged it from the gods. Suddenly he was all I had, and I was all he had.

“Their b-b-bodies were ca-arried aw-way by the w-w-waves! Bu’ lader, much lader, their gho-oo-osts were seen in the w-w-white foam. And they were sin-sin-s-singing!”

His goofy laugh was stretched out of shape. I made tea of Chinese herbs for him, while he chanted—in his drunken way—the Lotus Sutra. He stood on his head and swung his feet; his balance was better that way. I had to duck walking across the room or get hit by a flying foot. He stood on one leg with the other folded on his thigh, holding the wall. He fell, like a rubber man, and could not get up. He moaned and spit. He got me to rub his feet and had the herbalist come to stick paper poultices on his back, with magical inscriptions written on them. He prayed to the North Star whenever he could see it. I made pigments while he made circles to retrain his hand.

His heart was sick too. He had taken on the name Iitsu, meaning “one again,” six years before, in anticipation of a new life. But his renewed youth hadn’t materialized. He was well past sixty in years, and most of his peers were dead. He had illustrated books; he had made instruction manuals; he had created shunga. He was tired of the city and its vices. He wanted to paint the seas and the skies; these subjects had been difficult to do, with our fugitive blues.

Now here was beru, a new toy, and the Old Man came slowly alive. He prepared for a day of painting by rubbing the muscles of his feet, stretching his leg up to his nose, and hooking his arms around his back while opening and shutting his mouth. Our studio was quiet. Shigenobu was gone, my mother and sisters dead, my brother apprenticed to an account keeper. The men who had thought to learn from Hokusai had moved on. I got Hokusai’s ink ready and his water. He made a hundred sketches but his hand would not do what he willed it to. He gazed at Berlin blue to spur on his recovery.

I told him about the compass in the hat. We pictured the Dutch doctor measuring the sacred mountain over and over, from different vantage points along the road to Edo, and finding it unchanged. In his telescope sacred Fuji winked from under a cloud or behind a bridge, through the hoop of a barrel, under the curl of a wave. We laughed about this. Hokusai had the idea of drawing these views of Fuji-san. The publisher loved it. There was a cult in Edo that worshipped the Peerless One. All the adherents would buy the prints.

And now he had the blue that would make sea and sky resplendent. One day he would be well enough to use it. But he had to learn to walk again.

I
walked in the lawless open space along the riverbank, passing the haggling drunks and the temple dancers. The water was low and the sun slanted across it. Eagles swooped down on the stranded fish, then rose flapping over the twisted, brilliant strands of water, leaving shadows on the surface. My hands were stained turquoisey black with
beru.

I had gone directly to my father’s house when I left Tokei-ji temple. What choice did I have? He needed looking after and I needed a home. No one had asked for papers when I re-entered Edo. A bird leaving a cage must be cunning and find the exact moment. A bird returning to a cage finds the door ajar.

We were not selling much work. Hokusai did not paint; he could only dream of the sacred mountain and the roads he would take to see it. My themes were gloomy: a sketch of an attempted rape; my father as an immortal, playing with a pet toad.

Still, I had at least achieved a measure of peace. My cage was comfortable. In two years I had reverted to being an unmarried daughter. There was no other choice. My father still suffered from his palsy. It was expected that I keep his work alive. What did we live on? No one actually asked, and if they did, they did not get a truthful answer. I affected a bizarre posture that kept people from approaching me, my head leaning steeply on the angle as if my neck had been broken. I scowled to show that I did not conform to female ways. I made my way around the city, to the publisher with designs, to the market for butterfish and soba noodles. I loved these errands. I had certain reasons for happiness: I was painting, and I had met the Dutch doctor.

In my dream the night before, the Dutch doctor was playing in the waves, the way my father did. I stood on the shore. The waves became higher and higher, and I walked up and down trying to keep him in sight. The waves swallowed the horizon, and then—even with his tall hat—they swallowed him.

It was a frightening dream and I couldn’t shake it. I walked along with it still alive in my mind, marvelling at the way I had recreated the tall barbarian so exactly.

Above me the Kawara-ban crier appeared, running, on the Ryogoku Bridge. I climbed the bank. At bridgeposts, the moneylenders and the soothsayers sat like bookends. You could borrow from your earthly future or gaze along into your heavenly fate, one-stop convenience. The moneylender had his long loops, with the hole-in-the-centre coins threaded through the rope coiled in front of him. The soothsayer moaned and swayed.

The crier pulled back his black hood as he reached the top of the arch of the bridge. I saw his human features for a moment: haggard, pockmarked.

“A typhoon has struck the town of Nagasaki. The Island of Red-headed Strangers has been destroyed.

“The typhoon has devastated the surrounding country. Whole towns have been blown down. Many people have died. The ship called the Cornelius Hauptman has been crushed on the rocks. Its cargo of eighty-nine chests of stolen Japanese treasures will be seized.

“Hear me, hear me. The Shogun tells our people that the Miracle Doctor has been found to be stealing many precious objects from the Japanese. The gods have acted to destroy the foreign devils.”

I followed him. I was frightened, of the news and of myself. The dream had told me this. How did it come to me, and from where? Was I, as some people said, a witch? I feared for the doctor. I feared for our paintings.

The crier came to a little storytelling hall. “This way to hear the story of the Dutch doctor,” he said, holding out his hand for coins.

Many of us crowded in. I tucked myself into the back row amongst the packages and the cats, the way I had twenty years ago.

“You all know of the Miracle Doctor who lives on the Island of Red-headed Strangers in Nagasaki Bay,” he said.

“Yes!” said many.

“No!” said others.

“He’s a good man,” some shouted. “He saved many lives.”

The storyteller appeared and the story began:

The Miracle Doctor was well loved. So well loved that his superior officer was jealous. That superior officer complained to the powers in his country across the sea: the Miracle Doctor spent too much money; he went his own way, heedlessly. The powers recalled the doctor to Holland. He must go back home.

He was devastated; he loved Japan. He had collected many treasures to take with him—flowers and trees and a giant salamander. But there was one treasure he could not take with him. She could not be bartered for or hidden in a cloak. Two treasures, actually: Otaki, his Japanese wife, and their daughter. Their keeper, the governor of Nagasaki, would not take a bribe.

He sat playing his piano in his quarters on the island in Nagasaki harbour. He heard a loud noise. He went to the narrow slit that let in air and caught a glimpse of a surge of water reaching over the wall and spilling on the inside.

He didn’t recall water that high. A storm was coming. He looked to the clouds: streaks of green. He’d sailed in a typhoon to get here five years ago. He was suddenly afraid he would not get away.

He thought of his lacquerware and baskets, kimono and objects of devotion. The small carved wooden toys and pictures of funerals. Books. Maps. He had filled the waiting ship with these treasures to take with him.

The storm lashed.

He went to the Water Gate. The guards were gesticulating at the edge of the water, their voices lost. The little sloops that went back and forth to the ships were foundering. The sky was black and yellow. The wind came into the bay as if down a tunnel.

The water leapt the walls of the island and splattered on the rooftop.

He called the captain.

“We must leave now.”

“It’s too late.”

“But the ship?”

“We are trying to secure it.”

I hadn’t encountered this storyteller before. He was good. He had thick hair that stood up straight on top of his head, and a stocky body, and a voice that he could send out of himself so it seemed to come from a man in the front row, whom he had made into the captain. I was not so impressed, as I could do that myself. Von Siebold’s accent he copied perfectly, and his voice he made high and womanish and sent it behind the curtain as if the Miracle Doctor were hiding. This was a good trick and made people laugh. The story captured my imagination and gave me time to think, to grow calm.

One day later von Siebold clung to a plum tree in his garden, trying to stay upright in the wind. He had transplanted it himself, and it was now ten feet tall. But even as he gripped its trunk the wind came down, sucked up its roots, and tossed it like a carrot upside down over the roof. He was thrown sideways against the wall. He roared with rage.